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I’ve just wrapped the first draft of Century of Sand 3. This is the longest it’s ever taken me to write a book. The first draft of God Factory took six months. The first draft of CoS1 took eight. Nine years, though? To be fair, I started CoS3 while I was still drafting CoS1. The whole trilogy formed as a whole, and I wrote the final, final scene of CoS3 (in an embryonic form) some time in early 2008, before...

What feels like ten million years back I posted the opening scenes of a scifi novel called, at the time, Project Goma. I’ve now taken that novel through four complete redrafts and the finished manuscript, God Factory (AKA Hacker Sapper Soldier AI), is pretty damn tight. I’m now looking for test readers. If you’re up for 120k worth of scifi shenanigans set on a machine planet, full of pewpew and explosions and deep thoughts, sound off! I’ll get you the...

I’m on the roadway now, navigating a traffic jam. My phone is in my breast pocket. Hopefully, it’s recording everything I say. I can’t check that of course, because pulling your phone out of your pocket to see what the app is doing while navigating heavy traffic is suicide. Nevertheless, curiosity and the need to write at least 1000 words a day despite the job (sometimes gripping me from 630 in the morning at 10 o’clock at night) drives me...

“You understand,” the deputy principal said, “that teachers cold-cocking their students rarely sits well with the P.T.A.” In Bobby Graves’ defense, the kid threw the first punch. There were twenty witnesses in the classroom who’d testify to that. Shit, Bobby didn’t even mean to hit back. Just brought his fists up fast, old army training kicking in, trying to block and trap. But his instincts were rusted, and the kid – Anton Tripp, seventeen years old, built square and heavy...

To celebrate the release of Olesia Anderson #8: Wetwork, I’m giving away the first Olesia Anderson omnibus to all new and existing mailing list subscribers! It’s seriously simple: 1) Sign up to my mailing list 2) You’ll get a confirmation email with direct download links for Agent 806 in DRM-free .mobi, .epub and .pdf formats 3) Enjoy! It’s my way of saying thank-you for being such brilliant readers and fans. I wouldn’t have made it to Olesia #8 without your...

After TEN BILLION YEARS, the next episode in the Olesia Anderson thriller saga has launched on Amazon. Wetwork sees Olesia and her team of miscreants gunning for revenge after their narrow escape from Venezuela. They’re headed to D.C., in search of an old spook who can point them to Olesia’s nemesis, Patrick ‘Rat’ Burroughs. But D.C. isn’t the place Olesia remembers. It’s a warren of spies and senators, mercenaries and murderers, and Burroughs has them all in his pocket. He...

Another month passes. Still no new releases. What’s going on at Ruz HQ? A lot of writing, actually. This ugly-as-sin diagram shows where I’m at with my three primary projects. Olesia Anderson #8 is currently a 37k word manuscript, will probably hit 40k, and is already 2/3rds revised. It’ll be with test readers soon. Century of Sand 3 is further away from finished – it’s currently a 140k MS, projected to hit 160k (how did it get so big?) and...

The question a lot of horror authors get is, “Why do you have to write such terrible things?” And my answer is usually, “Um, ah, well, it’s entertaining?” But that’s not really why. I’ve been thinking about what drives me to write horror, and what inspired my series Rust. I could cite a lot of books and shows that I’ve loved (Uzumaki, Twin Peaks, The Ruins) but my love of horror goes all the way back to childhood. And where’d...

After a fantastic debut in Apollo’s Daughters (edited by the esteemed Bryan Young), my cyberpunk novella WEARY is available now on Kindle for 99c. That’s less than a KitKat Chunky, the undisputed king of chocolate bars. Weary is a military scifi with cyberpunk undertones that follows a returned soldier, Diana Yossole, working in the ruins of post-war Melbourne. Her deployment in China has left her mostly machine, a well-tuned military engine better suited to destruction than peacekeeping. So when she’s...